Inspirations: Stutz Black Hawk

The first in a series of pieces on the people and machines that inspire our work

Draw up a list of the most innovative engineers in the history of motorsport and some names inevitably rise to the top. Gordon Murray? Absolutely. Colin Chapman? Of course. From Georges Bouton to Adrian Newey, sport has forced the development of new ideas and a never-ending pursuit of the next game-changing development in the search for a competitive edge.

One name that definitely earns a position in that rollcall of innovation is America’s Frank Lockhart. History books will always record him as the winner of the 1926 Indianapolis 500 – a victory he achieved at his first attempt, aged just 23 – but the Stutz Black Hawk Special that he created to go for the Land Speed Record in 1928 illustrated his ability to think differently in the pursuit of performance.

Through the history of the Land Speed Record power has tended to be the route to success. Want to go faster? Add horsepower. Virtually every car during the piston-engined, wheel-driven era, before rockets and jets took centre stage in the 1960s, was driven by a vast engine. Or, as often as not, several of them. Lockhart took a different route, eschewing brute force in favour of a small, light and aerodynamic design, and he came within a whisker of adding his name to the list of outright Land Speed Record holders in the process.

The David-and-Goliath nature of Lockhart’s attempts is clearly illustrated by looking at his rivals. When he unveiled the Black Hawk Special in early 1928 the record holder was Britain’s Henry Segrave, who’d hit 203.79mph the previous year in his ‘1000hp’ Sunbeam. It will be familiar to anyone who’s visited the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu, where it’s resided since 1958. The Sunbeam had two 22.4-litre V12 aero engines combining to make something approaching the 1000hp in its name, measured 25 feet in length and weighed four tons. Just days after the Black Hawk was revealed, Malcolm Cambell would regain the record in his slightly smaller, three-ton Blue Bird II, 18 feet long and powered by just one 22.3-litre Napier W12 engine with around 500hp, reaching 206.956mph. His third rival was fellow American Ray Keech, who opted for no fewer than three, 27-litre Liberty V12 aero engines for his 4.5-ton Triplex Special, giving a total of 81 litres of capacity. He edged the record up to 207.552mph in April 1928, setting a new target for Lockhart.

So, how big was the engine of Lockhart’s Stutz Black Hawk to compete against these aero-powered behemoths?

Just under three litres.

That’s no larger than something you’d find in a typical passenger car of the same era. Lockhart was aiming to beat a rival with 27 times that capacity, and he very nearly achieved his goal.

To see how we need to skip back to 2026 and that debut Indy 500 win. At the time, for a brief period from 1926 to 29, Indianapolis racing regulations limited cars to no more than 1.5 litres. It was in a front-wheel-drive, supercharged, 1.5-litre Miller, powered by a straight-eight engine, that Lockhart took victory in 1926. The following year, 1927, should have been an even more impressive achievement. Again in a Miller, he took pole, averaging over 120mph, and dominated the first half of the race before a mechanical failure sidelined him from what looked like a surefire back-to-back victory. The key to that speed was the addition of an innovation of Lockhart’s own design: the first intercooler ever to be used in a car.

The same Miller would take Lockhart to the Class F Land Speed Record for sub-1500cc cars that year, hitting a two-way average of 160.01mph and inspiring the development of the Black Hawk Special for 2028.

The Black Hawk Special, named for and sponsored by the Stutz Motor Company, used two 1.5 litre Miller straight-eight engines merged into a dual-crank, twin-supercharged V16. Lockhart’s intercoolers would feature heavily – one for each bank, shaped to form a finned curve that became part of the car’s bodywork. That was just one of the car’s aerodynamic innovations. Others would include the spatted wheels, smoothly-sculpted suspension components and bullet-shaped bodywork: ice was used for cooling, eliminating the need for a radiator intake. Models were tested in wind tunnels, perhaps the first time that technology was ever used to shape a car, and the results were astounding.

With power estimated around 400hp-500hp, the Stutz needed to be lighter and much sleeker than its rivals. Weighing 1.3 tons and with a small frontal area, Motorsport reported that it made a pass at 202mph, only 1mph short of Seagrave’s record at the time, during its first runs on Daytona’s sands in February 1928. A scary crash that saw the Stutz somersault into the sea, caught by a gust of wind in worsening weather conditions, ended that attempt, but Lockhart was largely unscathed and undeterred.

His repeat visit to Daytona in April that year, after both Campbell and Keech had raised the record, saw him hit over 203mph on his third pass before disaster struck on the fourth when a burst rear tyre led to an unsurvivable, flat-out crash. Lockhart was dead at just 25 years of age but had already broken new technical ground both with his intercooler – a patent would be posthumously awarded on that idea in 1931 – and in the adoption of wind tunnel sculpted aerodynamics and minimal frontal area in an era where others put their focus on pure power.

Reflecting the enormity of Lockhart’s achievement, the intercooled V16 Miller engine, salvaged from the Black Hawk, went on to be fitted to a new racer a decade later. The resulting Sampson 16 Special raced at the Indianapolis 500 in 1939, 40 and 41, with a best finish of sixth, and returned for the first post-WW2 running of the event in 1946, qualifying on the front row in third place using an engine that, by then, was 18 years old.

Nearly a century later the aerodynamic ideas displayed in the Stutz Black Hawk Special are still instantly recognisable on machines you’ll see taking part in events like Bonneville Speed Week, and the intercoolers that helped it achieve so much power from a relatively tiny capacity have become the norm on boosted engines. We can only imagine what engineering solutions and racing successes Lockhart might have achieved if he’d lived longer.